Captain MacWhirr cannot fathom anything outside the facts of his own life. His first mate, Mr. Jukes, is the perfect contrast as an imaginative man prone to speaking in figurative language. Though they are opposites, MacWhirr and Jukes respect each other and run a tight ship, until the crew notices the barometer predicting a serve storm. Jukes and the crew suggest alternate paths to MacWhirr, but he is unconvinced. Since MacWhirr has not experienced...

Follows Professor Lidenbrock, his nephew Axel, and their guide Hans as they venture deep into a volcanic crater in Iceland on a journey that leads them to the center of the earth and to incredible and horrifying discoveries.

When fifteen-year-old Alexander Cold accompanies his individualistic grandmother on an expedition to find a humanoid beast in the Amazon, he experiences ancient wonders and a supernatural world as he tries to avert disaster for the Indians.

Tom, always looking for trouble, finds it when he sets out to become Hannibal's First Traveler. Tom, Huck, and Jim find themselves kidnapped by a mad inventor, sailing cross the Atlantic and into Arabian adventure on a hot-air balloon.

I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold'. Charles Marlow's dark intuition here arrives at the culmination of his physical and psychological quest in search of the infamous ivory-trader Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's most famous short story, Heart of Darkness. Ambiguously drawn to the powerful 'voice' of this autocratic...

A casual wager hastens the elegant and exacting Phileas Fogg on a rollicking ride around the world with his entertaining sidekick Passepartout in tow and the dogged Detective Fix hot on their heels. By cab, rail, steamer, and ingenious means improvised en route, they cobble together a global adventure in which they overcome all manner of unanticipated and sometimes uproarious obstacles while still managing to rescue the demure princess Aouda. Full...

Written more than two thousand years ago and one of Western literature's indisputable masterpieces, the Aeneid is the Roman “answer” to Homer's epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The latter celebrate Greek civilization through the stories of Greek victory in the Trojan War and the exploits of Odysseus. Vergil's Aeneid sings the triumph of Roman culture, transforming Troy's tragedy into a step on the path toward the founding of Rome by the descendants...

This compact novel, completed in 1900, as with so many of the great novels of the time, is at its baseline a book of the sea. An English boy in a simple town has dreams bigger than the outdoors and embarks at an early age into the sailor's life. The waters he travels reward him with the ability to explore the human spirit, while Joseph Conrad launches the story into both an exercise of his technical prowess and a delicately crafted picture of a character...

"Commemorating the 150th anniversary of one of the most beloved classics of children's literature, this illustrated edition presents Alice like you've never seen her before. In 1865, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an Oxford mathematician and Anglican deacon, published a story about a little girl who tumbles down a rabbit hole. Thus was the world first introduced to Alice and her pseudonymous creator, Lewis Carroll. This beautiful new edition of Alice's...

A masterpiece of storytelling, this epic saga pits Ahab, a brooding and fanatical sea captain, against the great white whale that crippled him. In telling the tale of Ahab's passion for revenge and the fateful voyage that ensued, Melville produced far more than the narrative of a hair-raising journey; Moby-Dick is a tale for the ages that sounds the deepest depths of the human soul. Interspersed with graphic sketches of life aboard a whaling vessel,...